March 28, 2024
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Greenville sand-salt pad in violation

GREENVILLE – Municipal officials are fuming after having learned that the town’s new sand-salt pad is in violation of state regulations.

After all, the town used a map supplied by the state Department of Environmental Protection to locate the new pad in nearby Moosehead Junction Township.

The violation was unknown until this week – after the town bought the lot, built a public works garage, constructed a pad and moved the mixture onto the pad.

Town Manager John Simko said this week that the town went through the necessary hoops to for approval at the new location. He said an asphalt pad was installed and an earthen berm was constructed around the pad to retain run-off.

To comply with state regulations, the pad could not be located within 300 feet of a drilled well, not within a Wellhead Protection Zone and not situated atop a sand-gravel aquifer.

DEP says Greenville violated the last condition. In a certified letter to the town, Tammy Gould of the DEP’s sand-salt pile program advised town officials they must apply for a variance if they intend to keep the pile in the same location. Similar variances, she warned, have been granted by the department only when a storage building has been constructed on the site.

Building over the pad would be cost-prohibitive for the town, Simko said Thursday.

“To find out now that the map we were provided is inaccurate and that we are now in violation seems unjust,” Simko advised Gould, in a recent letter requesting a variance. “But to hear that we may be forced to expend hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct a sand/salt storage building now because of this error is outrageous.”

Simko said he told state officials that if mitigation were required, the state should bear the cost.

“We sited this $24,000 storage pad on a location we were told was acceptable to the state of Maine,” he said. “If we had known that we were building on a sand-gravel aquifer, and that the pad would be in violation, we never would have built on this site.” And, he said, the town probably wouldn’t have bought the property.

Greenville is willing to work with the state to correct the situation, but cannot afford to pay for a new building or pad, Simko said.

“It was not an error or a fault on our part,” he said.

Disgusted that this issue will be time-consuming, Simko said his attention should be focused on other projects.

“I would rather be spending my time on economic development projects, rather than spinning my wheels on this salt-sand issue,” Simko said.


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